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May 1, 2026: Yael Valencia Aldana

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Yael Valencia Aldana was born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago, grew up on the neighboring island of Barbados, and moved to Brooklyn as a teenager. Adopted as a child, at age forty-four, she took a DNA test and discovered her maternal line: Indigenous, origin Colombia. As she tried to find her grandmother, she began writing poems again. Four years later, she entered an MFA program, and at the age of fifty-four, her debut collection, Black Mestiza, was published as part of the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry & Prose Series. The first poem in the book, “Talisman” declares “Ancestors…means nothing is lost.”

And then the speaker confirms that yes,

We are all in here together
xxxdistilled into this one casing of corpuscles.

I love this collection, the way it explores who we are and how we got that way. I also love the cover art. When I asked about it, I was thrilled to discover that Yael herself is the artist. The title of the painting is “Open Your Mouth,” and there’s a poem of the same name in the book. But this beautiful painting came first—before the words.

There’s so much truth in the painting, so much “I am a Caribbean Afro-Latinx/e woman with Indigenous, Black, and white roots,” and when I turn to the third poem in the first section, Yael’s description allows me to see this place where the wild women live, these women who “know how to stand in more / than one place in time.”

there is a slip of land on la frontera
a land of haunted untamed tongues
forked and black like the dark.
a land of wild women with smoke cloud
hair and legs that span rivers.
they know how to stand in more
than one place at one time.

In “Why Don’t You Write About Joy,” we read

Because you cannot hear me
doesn’t mean I am not singing.

But throughout this collection, we hear the singing.

And we see the “Black Person Head Bob.” This poem, which won a Pulitzer Prize, takes the reader inside. The opening line says so much, you almost don’t need anything else.

I still count. How many of us are in here?

The head bob returns in the third section of the book, in “The F Train 1999.” The speaker is running, running, and then

A wheat colored Timberland boot
pierces the silver line
of the closing doors.
I sail through steel toe cracked air
A head bob the only thanks needed.

That boot, the way it stops time. I can see it. And then the speaker leaps. Like a flying fish.

“I am small dark and moving,” the line and the image, carry us through all four sections of the collection, the first and last, my favorites.

In the last section, the speaker turns her eyes toward her mother, always moving, “iron-forged,” who dies and is buried, and then she turns toward her son “who looks just like his Granny.” And in this way the last section moves us from the past into the future. While always in the present. My favorite poem of this section is the second one, “Titan.”

You couldn’t know that when dealing
with the Titan that you become one yourself.

Yael earned a Master’s degree in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Florida International University (FIU). Her work has appeared in Torch Literary Arts, Cutbank Literary Journal, Obsidian, and Nelle Journal. Her work has also been featured in Poets & Writers, Ms. Magazine, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Hip Latina, and The National Latino Book Club. She is the Managing Editor at Purple Ink Press and a member of Aunt Lute Press board. She was named a Poets & Writers “5 over 50” for 2025. She lives in Florida.

Come back on MAY 1st to read how YAEL VALENCIA ALDANA spends her days.

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August 1, 2025: Dorsía Smith Silva

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When Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, Dorsía Smith Silva, age 44, started writing poetry again. As a child in Philadelphia, she was certain she would one day be a poet. As a teen-ager, she spent two summers at the University of Virginia’s Young Writers Workshop studying with poet Lisa Russ. But then life arrived, and one thing led to another, which led to a job at the University of Puerto Rico, which led to being a Full Professor of English.

Now her first book of poetry is out in the world. In Inheritance of Drowning, published in 2024, was a finalist for the Whirling Prize and for the National Indie Excellence Award for Poetry, and you can feel the power behind it. The poems are substantive and strong, telling the story of “the wind of loss” but also of the force it unleashes. After the storm, the words are bolder, lifting off the page of their own accord, the title poem asking, “How many ways can we drown?”

From “Driving in Puerto Rico (After Hurricane María),”

Barreling down streets full of large chunks
of black tangled wires, shattered glass,
and splintered stop signs,
I swing from lane to lane,
crisscrossing across the double yellow lines
like bursting lattices,
Now that the earth has fallen around me,
my car crushes all that is underfoot.

After the “weaponized wind” of Hurricane María—no power for days and weeks and months—the poet leaves, driven by one type of drowning into others…

From “When you tap the muscle memory of the blue tarp,”

                                                              Besides,
tears are not meant for brown girls. You have to
get back to your shift because there are bills to pay
and you want that return ticket, which isn’t cheap.

“Drowning in 5 Parts” opens with this:

We have always been drowning–
With sweat.
With fear.
With debt.

It’s this poem that begins the thread running through the rest of the collection and that answers the question asked by the title poem.

“It’s answer D on the test. All of the above.”

One section of “Everyday Drowning” lists the names of some of the Black people who’ve lost their lives in interactions with police and citizens. Dorsía placed the powerful, two-page poem “While Black” dead center and in landscape orientation so the reader must take an action and change the way they look at the page in order to read the poem, which begins,

                       driving while Black
entering your own house/apartment/business while Black
mourning while Black
listening to music while Black

In “Living In Puerto Rico Is As Close As I Can Get To Living In The United States,” Quiet “wears old house dresses and then comes to church on Sunday for doughnuts and blueberry bottom cake… Quiet would tell me to not make a fuss.”

Is that the same as invisible? Quiet stays quiet.

This poem ends with this line,

And when September comes, I don’t let the hurricanes holler alone.

Vincent Toro writes a fascinating Foreword that describes different ways to look at, and think about, In Inheritance of Drowning. The stunning cover below was designed by Mike Corrao using Winslow Homer’s Hurricane, Bahamas.

In 2024 Dorsía was selected for Poets & Writers 5 over 50 feature. “Being in my fifties means less fear of rejection and more trust in my abilities. This is the point where you feel assured to bet on yourself.” She is Lead Poetry Editor at The Hopper and has been a Best of the Net finalist, Best New Poets nominee, a Cave Canem Poetry Prize Semifinalist, and an Obsidian Fellow. She is the recipient of a Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship from Bread Loaf and Voices of Color Fellowship (Second Place) from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She is also the author of Good Girl (poetry micro-chapbook), editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering, and the co-editor of seven books. In an effort to increase the visibility of poetry by BIPOC authors, she is the creator of the Smith Silva Challenge, a reading challenge that highlights poetry books by BIPOC authors. She has also earned a Ph.D. in Caribbean Literature and Language.

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Come back on AUGUST 1st to read how DORSÍA SMITH SILVA spends her days.

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May 1, 2025: Esther Cohen

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In early 2023, Esther Cohen and I met on Facebook, and then on the last day of November, we met in person for a packed (thanks to Esther) 50-state bookstore event at Shakespeare & Co. in New York City. We had so much fun!

When Esther was young, her family went on vacation every year to Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskills. As soon as Esther would arrive, she’d visit the PR man who booked the talent so she could request an interview with anyone famous. (Esther was the editor of her school newspaper.) In seventh grade, by the resort pool, Esther interviewed Jayne Mansfield and her husband Micky Hargity.

[Jayne Mansfield] was very kind to me, and I tried hard, the next few weeks, to describe what it felt like seeing her (oh my god) and her husband (ditto) and asking her about her life. That experience was the beginning of my trying to write everything down. Years later, I’m still trying.

The subtitle of Esther’s most recent book, All of Us, published by Saddle Road Press, is “Stories and Poems Along Route 17,” a major highway in upstate New York. The book opens with two poems, and then we have a story in which the narrator falls in love with Middlefield, a “peculiar town” of sixty people. “What life looks like always depends on where you’re standing,” Esther writes in the first paragraph. “Where you stand is what you see.” This one and a half page piece has a lovely structure and so much truth and humor. In the second paragraph, the narrator takes us back to her family dinner table, where at every meal she was assigned the same seat and given the same wipe-off placemat. An apple. In the third and final paragraph, we are back in Middlefield where the narrator buys  a house.

We didn’t realize that the people you see are part of your view, that the people, all of them, are the real story of Middlefield, our town on County Route 17.

I underlined so much in this slim volume. In the piece called “Stories,” Esther writes, “These stories are our lives. They are what we know and how we say who we are.” In “On the Verge,” we have the story of Marguerite and her mother Katherine who happen upon an abandoned hotel that borders the river in Middlefield.

The rooms were small, but the floors were good and so were the walls and the roof. They could live in separate rooms if they liked. All the rooms had small refrigerators and stoves, a table and two chairs, and a surprising amount of sunlight. It took them a week to leave two lifetimes.

In the seven-page story called “Alexander Bloom,” we meet a woman called Annette who “married her husband Larry because he was funny. She doesn’t think he’s funny anymore.” The ending to this one was an unexpected pleasure, opening out just when I thought it would be contained.

Speaking of endings, in “For So Many Years I Wanted to Tell You This,” Esther writes, “I am a person who is always starting over. Every day. Trying to tell the very same story… beginnings are all I care about. Not all those inevitable endings.”

Every day Esther tries to get a little bit of life into words. She publishes some of those in her Substack Overheard. She has written eight books, worked with labor unions, and for Bob Marley. She directed Bread and Roses, a national cultural program for workers. She cofounded The Clara Lemlich Awards for women activists in their 80s, 90’s, and 100’s. She has written about the power of preserving memories for Oldster and about a mysterious craigslist poetry contest for The New York Times. And over at On Being, you can find her poem/photograph series with Matthew Septimus, who took the cover photograph for All of Us.

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In the Philippines in March

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November 1, 2024: JoAnn Balingit

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JoAnn Balingit was Delaware’s 16th poet laureate, the first person of color to hold the title, and she served from 2008 to 2015. Born in Columbus, Ohio to to a German American mother and a Filipino immigrant father, she grew up in Lakeland, Florida.

“Today the world begins again” is the first line of her poem “Still Life with Rows of Forgive,” which can be found in her full-length collection Words for House Story, a 2015 Best Books selection at Beltway Poetry. In this poem, a father pushes a red lawnmower.

Today the world begins again
with a weekend in October
lawnmowers spewing chords
laundry snapping dogs barking
from every corner
family surrounded
with noise of living on lawns
my father aspired to
but did not love

To love him properly
I need outside…

In this collection, you’ll also find a mother without whereabouts (maybe lost in the shower), windows over kitchen sinks, and migrations of birds. The narrator of “History Textbook America” receives a phone call from an uncle and then, “a dial tone erased the Philippines.”

In her poem “Meteor Shower,” the narrator and Julian have stolen away from the dishes and the black cast iron skillet to create a moment under the stars. Conversation bursts into the poem, making it feel intimate and playful. Eight couplets plus a final single line, highlighting that last line. And in each set of two couplets, the last word of each line is, respectively, spread, leave, clear, free.

The poem begins,

Julian caught the first one as we got blankets spread,
heads settled back, let the stars burn into focus to leave
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the days dregs, dishwater down the drain…

“Home School” is a prose poem. I majored in linguistics and love words and so does this poem. Here’s the first stanza:

His science glossary does not have contrary so he fetches The Junior
Book of Knowledge. He watches as I lower my OED to the table
like a baby or a side of beef, A hunk of pages drapes my forearm as
if somebody fainted. “Onion skin!” he crows, then asks, “Which
would you want: A little dictionary with big words, or a big
dictionary with little words?”

In 2023 JoAnn received a Fulbright Scholarship for the 2023-24 academic year, and at the beginning of 2024, she spent four months in the Philippines, the land of her father.

Dr. Balingit’s project, entitled WHAT WERE the NAMES of the TREES? A Memoir, is a hybrid-genre lyrical work about growing up bi-racial in the American South, and coming of age in the aftermath of the violent loss of her parents. Separated from her eight younger siblings, the lonely teen enters adulthood desperate to belong. During her stay in Pampanga Province, she will seek an understanding of her Filipino family history and the forces that shaped her father’s education and environment as a U.S. colonial subject before he migrated to the United States.

JoAnn holds a Masters in Library and Information Science from Indiana University, and an Ed.D in Educational Leadership from the University of Delaware. She worked as a school librarian and a teacher trainer in the public schools for twelve years. She is also a nonfiction writer and the author of Forage, winner of the 2011 Whitebird Chapbook Prize, and Your Heart and How It Works, which explores female identity and Philippine ancestry and received the 2010 Global Filipino Literary Award for poetry. She is the mother of four children born in Morocco, Portugal, Kentucky, and Delaware. She has lived in Delaware for over twenty-five years.

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Come back on NOVEMBER 1st to read how JOANN BALINGIT spends her days.

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Gina and me October 2023 Octavia Books New Orleans

September 1, 2024: Gina Ferrara

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In the summer of 2019, the Newport Beach police used Twitter to tell the story of the 1973 disappearance and murder of eleven-year-old Linda Ann O’Keefe. Gina Ferrara saw a story about Linda, who would have been about her age had she lived, and felt as if she were looking back at her young self. She wrote a poem about Linda. Shortly thereafter, another story surfaced about two young girls missing in Iowa and then another one about a young woman missing in Kentucky. Gina became obsessed by the lives of these missing and murdered women and set out to write a poem about a lost life in each state. The result is her beautiful collection Amiss.

“You Know the Number,” Colorado, shows the power of concrete physical objects and how much meaning they can hold. We feel how long this woman has been missing as the telephone on which the narrator has been hoping she would call changes into newer and newer versions. At the beginning, there’s a “mustard yellow rotary” in the hallway alcove, then the “pink princess” bedside, the “onyx wall mounted,”

And now the cordless

displaying who called in red numbers,

the size of lacerations and small stiches.

In “Witness,” Oklahoma, it’s the accumulation of details that allows the reader to understand the story. The one witness cannot speak. Someone left him in the aisle near the cereal with the extras out of reach,

to wander that night in newly minted steps,

motherless.

“One July Day,” Alabama, has a breathless, relentless quality. The poem itself shows how fast it happens. We see it and hear it and it’s over.

One July Day (Alabama)

 

A sheath of dirt dulling the mesh
screen door slamming, nearly unhinged,
in time to see edges of the sun,
the final dark arc of it visible, ablaze,
when her ride arrived, windows open
passing the river, black,
black river water irreversible,
an indelible underscore, a shooting arrow
hitting a target, the plaintiff calls
could be heard, whip-poor-whills
and bob white quails
echoing, something rhetorical
in those notes, no answers to be given
on why she was leaving again,
her reasons horded in town after town.

Gina Ferrara lives and writes in New Orleans. According to a friend, Gina’s love of words began at age nine when her grandmother suggested she write to her uncle Andrew who was in Vietnam. In addition to Amiss (2023), Gina has published four other poetry collections: Ethereal Avalanche (2009), Amber Porch Light (2013), Fitting the Sixth Finger: Poems Inspired by the Paintings of Marc Chagall (2017) and Weight of the Ripened (2020), a finalist for the Eyelands Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and was selected for publication in the Sixty-Four Best Poets of 2019 by Black Mountain Press. Gina teaches English and writing at Delgado Community College and is the curator of The Poetry Buffet–if you’re in New Orleans check out this reading series, which takes place one Saturday a month at the New Orleans Public Library.

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A 50-bookstore event at The Norwich Bookstore in Vermont May 11, 2023

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April 1, 2024: Dede Cummings

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Dede Cummings’ second book of poetry, The Meeting Place, was published in March of 2020 by Salmon Poetry. This collection is grounded in a physical place—a mountain that overlooks the confluence of the West and Connecticut Rivers. From the first poem, we learn

The Algonquians called it
“Wantastiquet,”
the meeting place.

From this place, the poems take us back to childhood, to first kisses, and to first loves. The first line of “Sisterhood” takes us to one of my favorite childhood places.

If I write of childhood, it is of closets and secrets.

In the first three lines of “For Mea,” the narrator jumps forward to having children of her own and a description of a new, deeper kind of quiet.

As I was ironing the old lace tablecloth this afternoon
in the quiet that only comes when a baby is sleeping
somewhere in the house. I thought of my Grandmother.

The collection continues with poems about husbands of thirty years and children grown and gone. Here are the last three lines of “Fledglings,” which take us below the surface of a marriage.

A bunch of new whitish eggs appear on the summer solstice,
the longest period of daylight around here, a long time
to be alone with each other and have nothing to say.

These lines from “Trail Magic” about women talking move us from our childhood closets to the great outdoors.

Our trio is fire and fury, following our ginger leader,
our restless lives abound with stories told, the unwritten code
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of secrets while hiking, of women around the world telling
the same stories over and over, but we know they are all true.

With “Foraging,” we’ve been with our spouses now another ten years…

We don’t talk about us being in our sixties and how the days are longer and move very quickly, how we don’t do much together anymore but go in different directions. As I walk closer to the marsh, you continue on the path.

My favorite poem in the book is called “Attach Meaning to an Object and You’ll Be Afraid to Lose It.” I was first drawn to this poem because of the title. I have an ongoing fascination with the meaning we attach to objects. Then I loved it for the story—a woman makes her way across a room, heats coffee, sits down at a table. Then the phone rings, taking the poem, and the woman, from the present to the past.

Dede’s first poetry collection, To Look Out From, won the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and was published in 2017.

In addition to a poet, Dede is also a publisher. Green Writers Press is a woman-owned, Vermont-based, global publisher. They aim “to publish books, eBooks, and audiobooks that will spread a message of hope and renewal” and “to build awareness to stop the global climate catastrophe.”

Dede lives in a hand-built, solar-powered home in southern Vermont. How cool is that. She’s also written these other books: Questions for the Dalai Lama, The Good Living Guide to Beekeeping,  Living with Crohn’s and Colitis Cookbook, Healing Herbs, and The Organic Composting Handbook. Plus, she’s an award-winning book designer, a public radio and print opinion commentator. And she’s married to musician and English professor, Steve Carmichael, and the mother of Sam, Emma, and Joe Carmichael.

Come back on APRIL 1st to read how DEDE CUMMINGS spends her days.

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Cheryl and me at East End Books Ptown in July

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March 1, 2023: Cheryl Clark Vermeulen

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Cheryl Clark Vermeulen and I had an event together in July in Provincetown. It was hot and humid, about to rain, but what fun to listen to her read from her poetry collection They Can Take It Out, which is divided into five parts—a first part missing a name, Thyroid and Other Matters (one long poem), Artgoing, The Almost, and Continue From Here.

In the long poem “Thyroid and Other Matters,” each page has plenty of white space and reads like a separate poem. There’s wordplay—endocrinologist and chronology, secrets and secretions. Page 11 begins with the title phrase, “They can take it out,” and offers an idea I’d never thought of—the idea of loving what’s missing, what’s gone, what was here but is no longer. It’s my favorite line in the collection.

To love the deletions.

Page 13 begins with, “After the diagnosis…”

After the diagnosis, her legs drag
secrets over the ground.

 

Some materials are being created in the world:
a body part newly grown (the heart valve)
and a cloak that can make someone invisible—

 

invisibility by redirecting the light.

 

On the ground, vomit or waterlogged woodchips.
A landscaping truck nearby narrows it to that of

 

woodchips, another deforested.

 

During a Californian wildfire, a family leaped
into a neighbor’s pool.

 

She’s exchanged runaway stories with herself.

Echoing a major theme of the collection, words are left out of this section of the poem, as they often are throughout the book. So the reader must make leaps. (And here on this page, there’s an actual leaping.) The missing words, ideas, and connective tissue give the reader work to do, and in that way, things are not just happening on the page but also inside us.

In the poem, “I Always Wanted To Be Somebody. I Should Have Been More Specific.,” lines attributed to Lily Tomlin, the first line is full of life and humor.

I must now stop liking things and go to bed.

In the poem, “An Unerring Stream Finds Trace     Unerring Streams Find Traces,” there’s this gorgeous line.

Art is my favorite future.

The narrators in these poems eat egg salad sandwiches and find heart-shaped rocks at Herring Cove. These are our lives. There’s illness yes, but also, humor and hope.

For a poet’s take on this wonderful collection, click over to the Heavy Feather Review to read Anna Zumbahlen’s thoughts.

Cheryl is also the author of the chapbooks Dead Eye Spring and This Paper Lantern. She received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems, translations, or poetry reviews have appeared in Caketrain, Drunken Boat, Jubilat, Tarpaulin Sky, and Third Coast, among others, and the anthology Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico. She edits poetry for Pangyrus literary magazine and teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she founded the Creative Writing Minor.

Come back on MARCH 1st to read how CHERYL CLARK VERMEULEN spends her days.

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Photo Credit Amy Salloway

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April 1, 2022: Michael Kleber-Diggs

Michael Kleber-Diggs was born in 1968, just days after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. He and his twin brother Martin were named for the slain civil rights leader, who was born Michael and became Martin after his father visited Hitler’s Germany in 1934 and changed his own and his son’s name. Michael’s origin story as a writer is one I’m familiar with. He started writing in 1999. His first book was published in 2021. Writers, don’t give up.

Michael’s debut book, Worldly Things, with its beautiful cover, won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, and is a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. I want to tell you about these poems.

Cover photograph by Wing Young Huie. Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker.

It feels a little like magic, the ways poets can use language to focus our attention. Take a look at how powerful one word can be when Michael places it at the beginning of a line and follows it by a period. From “End of Class,”

I pat her arm, start the car, and then we drive
away. Our hardy home is not that far from here.

From “Source of My Confidence,”

I open every window I have
wide. Spring air races through the rooms…

When Michael was eight, his father was killed at his dental office by someone looking for drugs. Many of these poems reverberate out from that moment of devastation and grief. From “After You Left,”

Father, the loss of you is a planet
orbiting what might have been.

From “Superman And My Brother, Spiderman And Me,”

Lost for months in our bedroom, our desperate island,
we began to confront a loss that reveals itself still…

The poem “Seismic Activities,” feels like two poems coming together to form a third, as rivers often do–the roman river and the italics river creating a rich, seismic river, all existing at the same time. Maybe it’s the past and the present creating the future or the past and the future creating the present. The poem feels fluid.

The poem “Coniferous Fathers,” begins, “Let’s fashion gentle fathers…” And let this line from “Confluence” stay with you for a minute.

Mist gathered just above the water made me think of marriage.

We learn from the Notes at the back of the book that Micheal wrote the poem “Another Black Man Killed in Police Custody Dies After Coma,” which is so powerful, by imagining newspaper articles (based on his research) that were written and then edited by deleting using strikethrough and adding to using bold text.

Michael brings the details of the world around him and the world within him to the page. The last poem in the collection, “Every Mourning,” will make your heart hurt with its truth. We are right there as the narrator’s fellow traveler crosses the street. Right there.

But the image I keep thinking about comes from the opening lines of “Ars Poetica,” which mention worldly things,

In a recent dream, I wanted something ordinary—eggs
or a hammer, a thing like that. So, I sought out a neighbor
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but not a real neighbor. I rang an unfamiliar bell.
Behind a hollow door, a man yelled, I called the police.

Last November, Michael was featured in Poets & Writers annual “5 Over 50.” Since 2016, he has been an instructor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. He also teaches Creative Writing in Augsburg University’s low-res MFA program and at Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. He has taught at in the MFA program at Hamline University and at Metropolitan State University. Michael is also an attorney. He was born and raised in Kansas and now lives with his wife Karen, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Come back on APRIL 1st to read how MICHAEL KLEBER-DIGGS spends his days.

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December 1, 2021: J. Drew Lanham

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In The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, which received the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Southern Book Prize, and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal, Drew writes, “My plumage is a kaleidoscopic rainbow of an eternal hope and the deepest blue of despair and darkness. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” One of the reasons I loved this book was the pleasure of being inside Drew’s head. “What is wildness?” he asks. “To be wild is to be colorful…”

The place J. Drew Lanham writes from is a childhood in Edgefield, South Carolina,

where Cheves Creek snaked foamy and quick and where Daddy taught us to fish. Wetting a line, hoping for a bream to take a wormy hook, calling the cows in from evening pasture; picking butter beans on a sweaty summer’s eve…the belly-filling satisfaction of homegrown food and thirst-slaking coolness of spring water; the awe of a whitetail leaping the blacktop road in a single bound; the wonder of finding an ancient arrowhead in a newly plowed field; the breathtaking beauty of the bluest jay against golden hickory leaves.

His writing lights up the brain with imagery and alliteration.

My memory continues to run like a rabbit around the times spent in the small piedmont place I call home. It weaves and winds through woods and wetlands to reconnect me to my nature-loving roots. That pleasant wandering is reason enough for remembering–and returning–home.

His love of nature gives him a strong sense of the order present in the world.

My heart has moved on to love other people, places, and things like I never thought I could. But that first place I knew as home will always be locked within.

He describes the chapters as “patchwork pieces stitched together by memory,” the book as “the story of an ecosystem–of some land, the lives lived on it, and the dreams that unfolded there.”

To listen to Drew read a short excerpt from the book via Krista Tippett’s On Being, click over to The Home Place.

In 2019, Drew’s essay, “Forever Gone: How bird lives and black lives intertwine under the long shadow of history,” was published in Orion Magazine and then chosen for the The Best American Essays 2019, as one of the twenty best essays of that year.

My office walls are covered with portraits of birds gone past existence. At a glance I can see ivory-billed woodpeckers, Bachman’s warblers, passenger pigeons, heath hens, great auks, and Labrador ducks. It’s an ornithological pantheon of loss. Some Gone Birds, as I call them, especially the ones that would’ve inhabited my southern home place, have cast spells that I can’t shake.

Today, when I lead others out to birdwatch in the remaining fragments of wild places, I cannot help but bring the history of the enslaved, and the landscape we tread upon, into the same head-heart space. I cannot tell stories of birds and of the cypress swamps and old rice fields I frequent in low-country South Carolina without telling the story of those who moved forests, soil, and water through force and greed. There are stories in the soil that have to be plowed up.

Back in 2013, before The Home Place and before “Forever Gone,” Orion Magazine also published his enumeration piece, “9 Rules for the Black Birder.” In lightening speed and with such simplicity and so few words, Drew turns me into the Black birder and I feel the fear. Rule number three:

Don’t bird in a hoodie. Ever.

In May of 2020, in Vanity Fair, Drew was asked about the “9 Rules.”

I don’t even know why nine rules, why not 10, 13, there could’ve been more. But I got to nine and I sort of exhaled…There are times in writing litany that you feel like you’re not breathing, and you feel like if you take a breath, you’ll lose the thought, you’ll lose the words, you’ll lose the flow. That’s what happened there: I didn’t want to lose the flow. I’ve been asked before about that nine—was there something magical you were thinking, something numerological? No. There were nine. And I didn’t need any more. I wanted in that process to then be able to exhale. And that’s when I did.

You can find Drew’s poetry, along with the “9 Rules,” in his most recent book, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts. And while you’re waiting for the book to arrive, click over to listen to Drew read “Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves.”

J. Drew Lanham is a poet, essayist, and memoirist who loves birds. He has a PhD in Forest Resources and teaches at Clemson University, where he’s an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher and Certified Wildlife Biologist. This January, he will be teaching a course online for Writing by Writers.

Come back on DECEMBER 1st to read how J. DREW LANHAM spends his days.

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

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August 1, 2020: Sean Hill

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I discovered Sean Hill’s writing on Facebook of all places. A friend shared his poem Governor’s Mansion Hands, and I clicked over and read the twenty-seven line poem, ignoring the footnotes as I often do. I loved it. And then I listened to Sean read the poem, and in addition to the poem itself, he read the thirty-eight lines of footnotes (that printed out as forty-five) and of course I should have too. I don’t remember reading a poem where the footnotes were as important as the text. And I keep thinking about that.

Footnotes are often in a smaller font, but in this case, they’re the same size as the main text and while they’re attached to specific words in the text, they magnify the whole. I would love for you to click over and listen to Sean read the poem. You’ll see what I mean.

I have so little experience with poetry that I crave reading what poets say about their own poems. Here are Sean’s words about Governor’s Mansion Hands (with thanks to Poets.org).

I’ve been thinking about narrative lately. With the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and others, I’ve been thinking about the stories we tell and the purposes those stories serve. Every night either my wife or I read stories to our four-and-a-half-year-old son. I’ve wondered how to talk with him about race, when to talk with him about race, and what that narrative will be. His mother is white. I am Black. I’ve been wondering where to start. In many ways, this poem is part of that thinking. I’m a fan of footnotes, both academic and literary. The footnotes here, which are part of the poem, are the speaker’s necessary digressions and elaborations that enable me, the poet, to begin to tell the story of the economically-driven narrative that constructed race in this country and the grip it has had and continues to have on society, our cultures, our communities, our families, and our lives.

Sean’s second collection, Dangerous Goods, won the the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. The book itself is beautiful, a boat on a beach, a flock of what I imagine to be starlings overhead (which inside the book fly in different formations on each of the section markers). Unlike other books of poetry, with my second read, I did not circle back to individual poems, but started again from the beginning. Only one poem in the collection uses footnotes, one to a page, “Schieffelin Bros. Exports & Imports.” Like the starlings, Sean’s footnotes seem alive on the page.

The collection begins with his postcard poems. The first line of the first poem is: “Yesterday I was, one place to begin”. In the second to last line, “an engineer keels / over.” The speaker of the poem has seen birds that day, and in the next poem, the speaker is in a car and sees barn swallows. In the third, we are with a “keel bone.” From the postcard poems, we continue to “Bahamas Voyage: Meditations on Blacks on Boats,” where at one point we’re on a slave ship. From there to “Voices in St. Paul’s Cathedral,” where “you can smell death left over from the days of the trade.” In “Fortnight,” and “Postcard to Anna,” there are pigeons and a green “hard to place like the tune the guy on the Tube whistled.” Can you feel the forward movement, the journey we’re on, that the poet is leading us somewhere or building something? The repetitions are like threads in a garment or rungs on a ladder or bricks in a wall or like all three.

In “Postcard to My Third Crush Today,” Sean works his magic on a common image.

Either way my heart
skips like those flat stones that kiss the skin
of the pond and fly off again before sinking.

The word desire picks up the baton or is the baton in “Distance Between Desires,” and the journey continues. In “Postcard to Listlessness,” I love the following line because wind always makes me feel as if things are happening, and when there’s no wind, it’s always a little sad.

Know winds as want or wont
xxxxxxand the doldrums as where winds go to die.

I’m not yet able to articulate what it felt like to read the last poem and specifically, the last two lines of the last poem and thus the collection. I can only encourage you to get your hands on Dangerous Goods. This collection does exactly what poetry is supposed to do–it unsettles and busts the world wide open. I can see more than I could before I read it.

Sean was born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, which is about a hundred and thirty miles northeast from where I sit writing this introduction and which is where Flannery O’Connor lived from age fifteen on. Now Sean lives in Montana with his family. For the 2020-2021 school year, he’ll be the Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana. In addition to Dangerous Goods, he’s the author of Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book, and which I’m about to order. But I’m particularly looking forward to Sean’s next book, The Negroes Send Love to Their Friends.

Stay well and…